Deborah Jones Merritt is Director of the The John Glenn Institute for Public Service and Public Policy and is the John Deaver Drinko/Baker & Hostetler Chair in Law at Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law. Barbara Reskin is a Past President of the American Sociological Association and the S. Frank Miyamoto Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington. Bill Lann Lee is a former Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights and a partner at Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann and Bernstein, LLP. Together, they wrote an amicus brief for the American Sociological Association in Grutter.

Lauren Robel is Dean and Van Nolan Professor of Law at the Indiana University School of Law, Bloomington, and is co-author (with Elisabeth Zoller) of Les états des Noirs: Fédéralisme et question raciale aux États-Unis (Black States: Federalism and the Race Question in the United States), a new book analyzing affirmative action in the context of American legal and political structures for a French readership.

Marjorie Cohn is Executive Vice-President of the National Lawyers Guild and author of "Affirmative
Action and the Equality Principle in Human Rights Treaties," 43 Va. J. Int. Law 249 (2002).

EDITOR'S NOTE

Following the US Supreme Court's June 2003 rulings in the University of Michigan affirmative action admissions cases Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger, JURIST invited a panel of 12 experts - including leading academic authorities on race and the Constitution, attorneys who had argued the cases on different sides, the former Dean of Admissions for the University of Michigan Law School who helped develop and implement the policy under attack in Grutter, and a senior fellow at a conservative think-tank - to write short essays on the decisions and their implications. We publish those essays here in the first comprehensive collection of perspectives to appear online or in print since the decisions were handed down. We hope they contribute to the ongoing debate on affirmative action and its place in higher education.

Bernard Hibbitts
Director, JURIST
Professor of Law
University of Pittsburgh